This disjunction between rhetoric and reality has made it so hard for mental health service user-led charity, the National Survivor User Network (NSUN), to fully commit to the framework we helped to shape.

NSUN connects nearly 2,000 groups and people in England with experience of mental health distress to encourage service user involvement and influence in commissioning and policy. As part of that work we have gained places on influential forums, not least in contributing to the implementation framework.

Charity staff and trustees thought long and hard before deciding to put our name to this document. We had to weigh up whether remaining a critical friend inside or campaigning outside is better for our members and the wider community.

Earlier this year we claimed that many government policies were not only failing to advance the strategy but were actually undermining its aims. For example, the Department for Education's decision to remove wellbeing and community cohesion from the school inspection regime is in direct contradiction to the strategy's call for more early intervention and education. Freed from these requirements, many schools are shutting counselling services and nine out of 10 academies are serving their pupils junk food, damaging mental and physical health with expensive consequences.

While we have criticised when appropriate, NSUN has also sought to work constructively with government in efforts to improve the situation where we find allies. Standing up to government policies we believe damage mental health while seeking to increase the positive influence of service users in government is a difficult line to tread.

In the end we decided that the Department of Health had given us a fair say, had incorporated many amendments suggested by us and our members – for example, we managed to change much of the document's tone so that it no longer subjectively branded all mental health conditions an 'illness' and disempowered service users as 'victims' and 'sufferers' suggesting they have no control over their lives – and that we would be doing more harm than good to distance ourselves.

In practical terms, our suggestions to emphasise the value of involving service users in the commissioning of their own services to an agreed standard, and enabling self-help, peer support, personalised budgets, training and education have all been taken up and will form part of the implementation instructions to medical and social care professionals, local authorities, commissioners, providers and employers, among others.

In essence we have been able to stress that mental health service users recover best when they are given control over their own lives and treated as having assets and potential rather than as problems to be medicated and managed.

Apart from it being morally right to give people control over their own lives, we found this approach can produce significant savings as people gain in confidence, skills and recovery when they are given control and resources.

The Lambeth Living Well Collaborative, for example, has helped more than 200 psychiatric inpatients get back into the community by helping them fulfil their ambitions and in Hackney, NSUN has seen service users grow in confidence while building a commissioning advisory group to shape services to their needs.

While we are very glad to have had the opportunity to promote this approach, it is not to say we agree with everything in the framework and much depends on whether it is implemented, not least by other government departments including the Department for Work and Pensions, whose benefit changes are badly hurting many people with mental health conditions.

For this framework to make a real positive difference, more power must be shifted to service users so they have control over their lives and recoveries through meaningful co-production of services, proper personal budgets and real involvement in decision making.

NSUN will monitor the implementation, partly through our new Mental HealthWatch scheme, whereby service users get involved in their local scrutiny groups and share intelligence and good practice. If we find that the health secretary's oft-quoted mantra "nothing about me without me" is indeed just empty rhetoric, we will not hesitate to withdraw our support and campaign vigorously against those who have wasted a valuable chance for progress.